Anna Karenina and others : Tolstoy's labyrinth of plots / Liza Knapp.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Introduction -- 1. The estates of Pokrovskoe and Vozdvizhenskoe : Tolstoy's labyrinth of linkages in Anna Karenina -- 2. Anna Karenina and the Scarlet letter : Anna on the scaffold of the pillory and Levin with his own red stigma -- 3. Loving your neighbor in Middlemarch and Anna Karenina : varieties of multiplot novels -- 4. Loving your neighbor, saving your soul : Anna Karenina and English varieties of religious experience -- 5. The eternal silence of infinite spaces : Pascal and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina -- 6. Virginia Woolf and Leo Tolstoy on double plot and the misery of our neighbors : for whom the bell tolls in Mrs. Dalloway and Anna Karenina.

With its complex structure, Anna Karenina places special demands on readers who must follow multiple plotlines and discern their hidden linkages. In her well-conceived and jargon-free analysis, Liza Knapp offers a fresh approach to understanding how the novel is constructed, how it creates patterns of meaning, and why it is much more than Tolstoy's version of an adultery story. Knapp provides a series of readings of Anna Karenina that draw on other works that were critical to Tolstoy's understanding of the interconnectedness of human lives. Among the texts she considers are The Scarlet Letter, a novel of adultery with a divided plot; Middlemarch, a multiplot novel with neighborly love as its ideal; and Blaise Pascal's Pensees, which fascinated Tolstoy during his own religious crisis. She concludes with a tour-de-force reading of Mrs. Dalloway that shows Virginia Woolf constructing this novel in response to Tolstoy's treatment of Anna Karenina and others.

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